A Shortlist!

What’s this? Two posts in two days?! You might be forgiven for wondering whether there is good reason for this lack of parsimony, dear readers. And there is. For I was informed on Monday evening that my work has been shortlisted for the inaugural Marcella Althaus-Reid Spoken Word Theology Competition.

The competition, an element of the 2023 Trans Theology Conference at York St John’s University, is named for an influential queer theologian who, although cisgender herself, had a huge influence on transgender theology. I confess I’m not really that familiar with her work but I have read a little bit about her impact on trans theology. If the brief summary of her work in this blog post is anything to go by, hers is a voice that the church still urgently needs to engage with.

My work has been shortlisted for the compeition alongside that of two other people. I don’t yet know who they are or what kind of work they produce. As you’ll see if you click on the competition link above, the call for entries invited stories, songs, poetry and spoken word. All will be revealed tomorrow (Thursday 7th Sept) when we present our work at the conference, which I’ll be doing via Zoom as I am moving house next week and can’t get down to York at this point. I guess we’ll also all find out tomorrow which of us has placed first, which second and which third.

I entered a 13-section sequence that I completed only days before the competition deadline, entitled “In(di)visible”. It consists of seven 13-line poems each with a seven-line stanza followed by a six-line stanza and each of which begins “The invisible woman [verb]”. Interspersed between them are six single-paragraph prose poems. The whole sequence is my most sustained attempt to reflect on my gender questions throughout my life and, inevitably with me, it engages with faith and the ways that it has rubbed up against my gender identity, not only the negatives (which you might expect to see) but the positives. Whereas the “invisible woman” poems flit around in time, the prose poems move chronoligically from primary school up to the point only a few years ago at which I began to properly accept myself as in some way transgender. The aim, however, was for these two strands to act very much in harmony with one another and read as a single piece.

I’m really excited about “In(di)visible”. It certainly feels like it pushes my own practice as a poet into fresh territory. I don’t mean to make any grand claims for it in relation to the entire body of poetry in English; simply that it represents significant growth for me as a poet both technically and in subject matter. Indeed, it’s significant emotionally and spiritually for me too: I cried writing a couple a sections of the sequence.

Two things really excite me about the shortlisting: the recognition from my own community, which is precious; and the recognition that this is, or can be seen as, a work of theology. I’ve been used to thinking of my poetry as often being theological but I realise that I’ve hesitated to think of it as theology. The distinction is perhaps subtle, but it’s nonetheless significant because it indicates a reluctance to lay claim to a label perhaps too solidly associated with academia. Indeed, although I know of other theology competitions—the Church Times theology slam comes to mind—I can’t think off hand of any other competition that identifies creative works as works of theology. In doing just that, the competition is breaking down barriers that, for the benefit of us all, should at least be made a lot more porous. And that in itself feels like it’s in keeping with Althaus-Reid’s legacy.

I leave you with this portrait of Althaus-Reid, paited for New College by my friend and previous collaborator, David Martin: